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I would like to know, why do people still judge people for playing video games? Its 2014 and I can't believe stuff like: video games are a waste of time or are for children is still being said in this day and age. Why do so many people judge people for liking to play video games?

^ I was going to say, the OP's "people" are in the process of quite literally dying out.

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Philitas of Cos, Greek intellectual, is said by Athenaeus to have studied arguments and erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death. British classicist A. Cameron speculates that P. died from a wasting disease which his contemporaries joked was caused by his pedantry.

In countries like Japan, video games are considered something you give up when you take on adult responsibilities.

It's only recently that in the US it became socially acceptable for adults to play a lot of video games, and people who don't play video games still associate them with manchildren who live in their parents' basement. In reality, lots of people with good jobs and families are still playing into adulthood. Just, in the 1980s when the older gamers started gaming, the games they played were designed explicitly for children, so it's hard for people older than that to unlearn that association.

Also you don't get a lot of portrayal of casual gamers in the media. Most gamers you see and hear about are the 8 hour a day MMO junkies. In reality most gamers fall more in the 5-10 hour a week, not interfering with social, family, or work responsibilities category. But the public face of gamers is the WoW episode of South Park and Big Bang Theory.

I would like to know, why do people still judge people for playing video games? Its 2014 and I can't believe stuff like: video games are a waste of time or are for children is still being said in this day and age. Why do so many people judge people for liking to play video games?

Video games have that aspect that you are playing them alone. Even if you do online multiplaying, you are sitting alone in a room. Movies and TV shows have a different image. You watch stuff together.

But everyone plays video games. And games are the next big storytelling medium, TV and movies will die sooner or later.

You see games replacing TV/movies as the most popular storytelling medium? I love games, but the stories that make good games are different than the kinds of stories that make good tv/movies.

Video games are inherently more social than TV and film. Even when you're watching a film with somebody you're sitting silently staring at the screen. The exception, of course, being when you're watching bad movies to collectively make wisecracks about them. But video games have local multiplayer options both coop and versus. Men bond over video games, I know parents who bond with their children over video games. Some video games are not social, but the medium is inherently very social.

My parents, who are in their 50s, were playing video games with me in the '80s. I doubt they were the only ones. Video games are fast becoming just another entertainment medium that respectable people everywhere can enjoy without stigma.

^ I was going to say, the OP's "people" are in the process of quite literally dying out.

Not really when you have contact with the polar opposite, i.e. people who have a very active, i.e. much sports lifestyle and are generally outdoor people.

Now it always depends on the character of the person but i've met plenty of people who think gaming is for kids, nerds and basement dwellers and they look down on such people because their lifestyle is the one and only true lifestyle and everybody should be doing it.

However the general attitude has changed tremendously since i've been a kid 30 years ago and the computer/console scene was in its infancy in the early 80s.

Having a computer back then, even if it were only a C64 and knowing how it worked besides loading up games put you immediately in the nerd category.

It only started to change with Nintendo consoles and finally the barrier broke when the Playstation and later on the Xbox broke the barrier.

Now even so called jocks and everybody else sat down once in a while to play some Halo, Call of Duty or some of the million sports games available so it became socially more acceptable and on top of it regularly beats Hollywood in revenue by a large margin now.

So the time is thankfully over when you get strange looks once people see some consoles or computers at your place.